I felt that the biomedical and psychosocial approaches were insufficient to explain the disabilities of my patients and how those impacted their lives. The physical environment was really an etiological factor. If you have a person with a particular type of disability, you can approach it from the standpoint of reducing the impairment using pharmaceutical management or even a surgical procedure. But there's a point at which medicine and surgery don't work anymore. |
I felt that we really needed to look beyond the existing model to understand how people overcome their disabilities. I wanted to develop a conceptual basis of how medicine should change in the future, how it should evolve in a way that would be more meaningful to people, rather than just focusing on pathology. |
We came up with a model that recognized that the environment is important in determining physical disability. |